> We may agree, but previous contributors will always have the right to
> disagree, and to block our attempts to change licensing terms on text
> they wrote, because of the absence of a contributor agreement.
They can try. We'll fight them on the beaches.
> So the
> next question is: is this issue worth pursuing at all? If so, then we
> really would have to think about contacting everyone and getting them to
> sign an agreement. If that's too complicated to contemplate, then I
> think we're really stuck with the existing licence (not that that is
> bad, necessarily).
but they never agreed to that licence in the first place :-}
However, I would take the line that all contributions to the Guidelines up until
recently have been fed through the editors, who accepted them as grist to a mill
and then tuned their own prose. So I might claim that Michael, Lou and Syd
contributed all the IPR; and they were all paid by the TEIC to do so, therefore
the TEIC owns the IPR.
>> The current GPL licence would (possibly) allow us to enforce those NOs
> if we wanted to. We might still agree that we don't care to, because
> it's not in the interest of propagating TEI.
thats a dangerous game to play. if we ever _do_ want to enforce it,
people might ask why we never pursued obvious violations in the past.
A judge would take that into account.
--
Sebastian Rahtz
Information Manager, Oxford University Computing Services
13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431
Sólo le pido a Dios
que el futuro no me sea indiferente